Use wheezy or stable in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list?
Definitions:
- "break package manager" defined as "apt-get will not be able to finish
upgrading. Stop in the middle. Whonix maintainers may or may not be able
to release a fix and or instructions to repair it.
Using stable:
+ Requires no intervention from Whonix maintainer since it will
automatically upgrade at some point to jessie when Debian developers
bless jessie as stable.
- Forced upgrade of Whonix jessie at decision time when Debian
developers bless jessie as stable might break package manager. Risk of
such breakage can be reduced by making Whonix's Debian packages
compatible with jessie/testing early. More maintenance effort by Whonix
maintainer to continuously check jessie/testing compatibly since it is
an always changing target (besides in the period of Debian freezing
testing).
Using wheezy:
+ Better control on when system will be upgraded to jessie by Whonix
maintainer. No surprising upgrade to jessie.
+ Less maintenance effort for Whonix maintainer. Work on jessie
compatibly can begin as soon as jessie was blessed stable by Debian
developers. But then there is very little chance of getting any Debian
changes into that version that Whonix would require.
+ Less chance of breaking package manager.
- Upgrading Whonix to jessie gets complicated, since the
anon-apt-sources-list package can change the file but not run apt-get
update. Whonix packages made compatible with jessie-only (I hope there
is no need to break compatibility with wheezy anytime before jessie is
blessed stable for a while) would not be installable on the currently
running wheezy based version that is supposed to be upgraded also
leaving with a difficult to manage situation.
At the moment we're using stable over wheezy and I think it is the less
problematic choice.
Why is this a non-issue for Ubuntu or many other derivatives of Debian?
They rebuild the whole Debian archive on their own servers and the
dedicated manpower available for this endeavor.
Maybe Whonix's repository should also use codenames wheezy and jessie?
And use wheezy in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list. At some point
when jessie was blessed stable by Debian developers and Whonix is fully
compatible with jessie, tell users to switch wheezy to jessie in
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list as well as in
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/whonix.list (using whonix_repository [1] tool)?
Package in question:
https://github.com/Whonix/anon-apt-sources-list
File in question:
https://github.com/Whonix/anon-apt-sources-list/blob/master/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list
[1] https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Whonix-APT-Repository
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